A Study On The English Translation Of Lu Xun's Literary Works From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

This thesis aims at discussing the translation principles, strategies and styles of the translated literary works in a special period from the perspective of relevance theory. Relevance theory since being proposed has been researched beyond the field of pragmatics, and translation is one of the disciplines significantly influenced. With the great explanatory power, relevance theory overthrows the traditional static conception of translation study and views it as a dynamic ostensive-inferential process of verbal communication, which falls under the interlingual interpretive use.Conveyance of cultural information is quite a burden in literary translation for different cultural backgrounds or the translator's competence will probably lead to the change or even lost of that information. This thesis mainly covers some translations of Lu Xun's literary works and tries to explore how to faithfully convey the information of the original text at the same time taking into consideration the target reader's cognitive ability on different cultural backgrounds. Facing a large amount of culture-bounded information, the translator should consider the cognitive environment of both the original author and the target reader and try to convey the author-oriented information to make the communicative intention and the reader's expectation meet. In order to achieve this, several translation strategies used are necessary to bridge the discrepancies caused by different cultures and time. In this process, optimal relevance is always the guide for successful translation. Hence the conveyance of optimal relevance becomes the translator's task. The translator needs to comprehend the optimal relevant information envisaged by the original author in the right way and expresses his understanding to the target reader in a way that is optimally relevant to them. The presumption of optimal relevance requires the translation relevant enough to be worthy of the target reader's effort to process it, and is the production compatible with the translator's abilities and preferences. Therefore, it allows the translator to represent his own translation style and meanwhile restricts the exaggeration of his subjectivity.This thesis divides the translation strategies into direct translation and indirect translation. According to Gutt, direct translation concentrates on preserving the"communicative clues"left in the linguistic properties of the original text while indirect translation emphasizes on reaching the cognitive effect and may change the linguistic form. They form a continuum, most of which is covered by indirect translation, and direct translation picks out the limiting case. Both of these two categories can be defined within the interlingual interpretive use in relevance theory and should be viewed as a joint contribution to the overall optimal relevance. From the analysis of the strategies used in translating Lu Xun's literary works, it is to be found that with the right assessment of the target reader's cognitive environment and cognitive ability, the translator attaches great importance to transplanting the cultural information to them on the basis that the translation is worthy of the target reader's efforts to process it. Hence, with the great explanatory power of relevance theory, literary works are absolutely translatable and the specific translation strategy used as well as the style reflected can also be well explained.